"Apprentice" Wannabe's X-Rated Past

SEPTEMBER 12--The newest season of NBC's 'The Apprentice' doesn't debut until next week, but we've already made our pick for Donald Trump's next flunky. Meet Alla Wartenberg, whose network bio describes her as a 31-year-old Russian expat who has made millions running a chain of Las Vegas spas. Left off Alla's online c.v. is her work at the Palomino Club, a Sin City strip joint where the female talent works topless and bottomless. Wartenberg (nee Kosova) once hustled $40 lap dances under the pseudonym Ecstasy (just 'X' to her friends). It was during her Palomino days that Wartenberg developed a 'pretty platonic relationship' with a regular named Robert Acremant, a California businessman who would pay her between $500-1500 (and sometimes more) for an evening's worth of dances and company in the private Lipstick Lounge. She occasionally would have dinner with Acremant, who once gave her a pair of diamond earrings and also provided Wartenberg with about $500 to gamble. It was this courtship of Wartenberg, investigators would later contend, that drove a desperate Acremant--who needed money to spend on his favorite Vegas stripper--to plot the 1995 robbery of two Oregon women. That attempted heist ended with Acremant killing the duo. He also murdered Scott George, a California friend, in a second botched 1995 robbery bid. Convicted in the slayings, Acremant has been sentenced to death in both California and Oregon, where he is currently imprisoned. According to investigators, Acremant considered Wartenberg his girlfriend, while she saw him as nothing more than a cash machine, a pleasant mark with whom she shared her phone number, but no intimacies. According to Wartenberg, during Acremant's last Vegas visit, in December 1995, he pulled a handgun and stun gun on her as they were parked in a car. As she testified in August 2002 at Acremant's trial for the George killing, he was 'panicking and freaking out, telling me that he, you know, he was very upset with me because I never loved him. I just used him for money.' Wartenberg escaped unscathed, though she told jurors she was left 'emotionally injured and scarred for life' by Acremant, who 'led me to believe that he was either in the mob or...one of those big business guys, FBI, I don't know.' Below you'll find excerpts from her Tulare County Superior Court testimony, during which Wartenberg spoke of her stripper days and her killer client. (15 pages)